Deadline New York reports that Marvel Studios is moving ahead with Joss Whedon as director of The Avengers. The site says he is now in final negotiations to helm the action adventure scheduled for a May 4, 2012 release.

The film would feature many of the lead actors involved in Marvel Studios adaptations right now, including Robert Downey Jr. ("Iron Man" films), Chris Evans (Captain America), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury) and more.

What villain is big enough to warrant the attentions of Earth's Mightiest Heroes? Who will be the bad guy in The Avengers in 2012?

Over the last few months I've been doing some sleuthing (aided by George 'El Guapo' Roush of Latino Review), much of which I can't yet share with you, but it has led me to the conclusion that the foe the Avengers will face will come from beyond this planet, and that they will in fact be the Skrulls.

Except there was one major hiccup: I wasn't sure if Marvel owned the cinematic rights to the Skrulls. The alien race first appeared in the pages of Fantastic Four, and Fox owns the rights to the traditionally Fantastic Four characters. So while interviewing Kevin Feige at Comic Con this past weekend I had to try and get an answer.

'Will the Skrulls be the villain in The Avengers?' I asked.

Feige gave me one of those looks he's good at giving and just said, 'We do own them.'

More digging turned up the fact that Marvel Studios owns the Skrull race, while Fox own the Super Skrull.

The Skrull are a shape changing alien race who have had a hard-on for Earth for quite some time. They would make a pretty great big bad for the film for a number of reasons: first of all, there's a bunch of them, so the film wouldn't have to contain just one or two fight scenes with the main threat, and each of the team members could have their own battles at their own power level. For another, they allow Marvel Studios to do something really cool - what if it's revealed that certain characters from the previous Marvel movies have been Skrulls all along? And Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch proved in the first Ultimates series that the Skrull (called the Chitauri there) make a convincingly cinematic threat.

Of course the other possibility is that The Avengers will battle Hydra. As I mentioned in this story about The Invaders possibly appearing in The First Avenger: Captain America, Feige name-dropped Hydra as being something with which Steve Rogers had to contend. Might the truth be that Steve Rogers would just meet some of the Nazi supervillains who go on to head Hydra? And with The Avengers being a SHIELD group in the movies, it might make sense to make the villain a SHIELD villain. On top of that, like the Skrull, the sheer number of Hydra agents mean the film could contain lots of battles and that each of the Avengers could get something to do during the course of the film.

All of this is sheer speculation, of course, but I think that Feige mentioning that Marvel owns the Skrulls, combined with what I've been able to dig up, points strongly to the bad guy in The Avengers being not a guy but a whole empire.

It’s already confirmed by the Comic Con footage that “Captain America,” which, like “Thor,” leads into “The Avengers,” [spoiler]features the Cosmic Cube, though it is being referred to as the “Tesseract.”[/spoiler] And Marvel has teased a possible intergalactic threat before, [spoiler]with Comic Con crowds catching a quick glimpse of a prop that looked suspiciously like popular Marvel plot device the Infinity Gauntlet, a glove that contains the Infinity Gems—each one of which is capable of dramatically reshaping the chemistry of the universe.[/spoiler]

There’s no confirmation on where the newspaper found this information, though it does confirm that “Thor” and “Captain America” will feature stories that play heavily into “The Avengers,” [spoiler]suggesting that twisted Nazi Red Skull’s (Hugo Weaving) plans for the Tesseract in World War II could spill over from the latter, and the villainous Loki (Tom Hiddleston) of the former could figure into the “Avengers” narrative as a possible manipulator on a slightly more cosmic level.[/spoiler]

What we do know is that major players in “The Avengers” include Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). Could there possibly be another big role, that of Captain Mar-Vell? The Kree superhero, and one of Marvel’s more beloved cult characters, was a major player in the Kree-Skrull conflict, suggesting one more costumed hero for the mix in “The Avengers.” Would the company then use the character, also known as Captain Marvel, as another possible spinoff? If they did so, it would certainly be a way to undercut Warner Bros. long-in-development project “Shazam,” also dependent on a hero named Captain Marvel. Sneaky sneaky, Kevin Feige.

Re: The Avengers (2012)

Re: The Avengers (2012)

is thor an alien? i dunno if corss selling all the franchisers together will be a good idea, it may take away what has already been established in other movies like iron man, and getting the atmosphere/feeling from those movies all meshing into one????

Re: The Avengers (2012)

Originally Posted by chatterbox

is thor an alien? i dunno if corss selling all the franchisers together will be a good idea, it may take away what has already been established in other movies like iron man, and getting the atmosphere/feeling from those movies all meshing into one????

it could be the super-dud of all time! hope they pull it off

I hear you. Think we just have to accept that Thor is a God, and not of this world. Theoretically you would think he's the most powerful, but I bet it doesn't show like that. I pretty excited for this anyway.